


Borrowed Goods

by Kalya_Lee



Series: All The Days That Never Came [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Episode: s03e08-09 Human Nature/Family of Blood, Gen, doctor!Martha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 16:47:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1948707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So help me, Mr Smith, she almost thinks, I'm turning into you.</p>
<p>She was so young when he left her, almost-doctor Martha Jones. She's no longer young, and she'll never be almost-anything again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Borrowed Goods

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second in a series of AU stories, but can be read on its own. :) Enjoy!

He holds the watch in his palm.

It looks smaller, somehow, dull grey and perfectly ordinary. The catch on the top seems nearly rusted through, and the patterns on the back used to entrance her but now they look like little more than scratches, blemishes, damage. Maybe it seems so pitiful now because its job is done. Or maybe it’s just because everything always looks diminished, compared to him.

He twirls it in his long elegant fingers like a nervous tic, like the hyperactive child she always saw in him, and Martha can feel her heart break.

“You’ll be alright,” he says, smiling that sad-happy smile of his, and her knees go weak as they always do, and she hates them both for it. “You’ll go home and live your life and, and, pass your exams, and do all those beautiful human things you always wanted to do, and. It’ll be. It’ll be good.”

Martha stares, and says nothing. Nothing she could say would ever change his mind, and her words would only hurt him. She’s never wanted to hurt him.

“I just want you to know,” she says, finally, and it comes out as a whisper. “I – I’m crazy about you. And you never, you never even _see_ me, not really, even when I’m right in front of you.” She takes a breath, and her voice is stronger. “But that’s alright. It doesn’t matter. I just – I just want you to be happy. Will this make you happy?”

“Oh, Martha,” he says, with all the love she’d always wanted from him, and too much pain. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Don’t,” says Martha, and takes a step away. “I understand.”

He smiles again, too bright and too sharp. “Don’t you always.”

_Yes_ , she thinks, and tries to smile back.

***

“It’ll hurt,” Martha says, just before, like she did the last time. This time it is not a question, and she does not say _It’ll hurt you_ , because that is not what she means.

“Change always does,” he says, with a nonchalant shrug. His trainers are in the corner, lined up neatly next to his brown suit. It’s all folded, crisp corners, and she hates how he’s neat now when he’s never neat, and she hates how his new ordinary human clothes fit him so perfectly, and.

She hates how brave he can be when he’s hurting her.

“Doctor…” she says, and wants to ask, _if I had been her, if I’d been Rose or Joan or anyone else, would you be doing this? If I’d been better –_ and she doesn’t want to ask, she doesn’t want to ever know.

“Martha,” he says, eyes shining, “You were always too good for me.”

She holds him tightly as he screams.

After, she leaves him outside, wrapped warm in a winter coat, with one heart in his human chest and a silver key in his front pocket. He’ll keep it always, she knows, and though he will never know it it’ll be a reminder of her, of himself.

After, she holds the watch in her palm, and it is warm and glowing and it seems bigger again, and of course it does. The watch is him, again. He had always been so huge to her. He’d been very nearly everything.

_But_ , she thinks, breathing deep. _That was before._

“Alright, old girl,” says Martha, laying her hands on the TARDIS console. It hums under her fingers. “He said you’d take care of me. So go on. Take me home.”

***

The TARDIS does not take her home.

***

The sky outside the doors is pale purple, and the ground is all chafed ochre sand. The sun is shining happily and there’s quite a pleasant breeze blowing, but then the sun is a whitish-grey and the breeze smells of spices that Martha finds familiar but can’t quite place.

“Okay,” says Martha, calmly, reasonably. “I said London, 2007. This is not London, and I’m fairly certain that it’s not 2007. Let’s try again.”

The TARDIS, in response, slams the doors in her face.

“Right,” says Martha, very much not pouting. “Fine. You have your tantrum, and I’ll be back in an hour.”

The spiced breeze turns out to be coming from a huge vat of spiced wine, boiling in the middle of what probably counts as a marketplace on this planet. There are food stalls, too, selling neon-coloured vegetables on sticks that look surprisingly delicious and unidentified chunks of meat that Martha decides to steer well clear of.

She finds the Doctor’s psychic paper in her coat pocket, where she’d most assuredly not put it, and thinks, _what the hell_.

The vegetables are, indeed, oddly tasty. The spiced wine is sweet and warming and lovely and just a bit addictive, and Martha gets not at all tipsy, okay, maybe a little. She shops until the sun sets and starts a conversation with someone humanoid and bright orange, and after there is a dance in what is likely the town square, and Martha joins in despite herself, joining hands with strangers in a circle and getting the steps wrong and feeling really rather foolish.

She is, needless to say, not back in an hour.

The TARDIS hums as Martha enters, and she smiles, tired and a bit annoyed and a bit grateful. “No need to be so smug,” she says, trying to sound severe. “That was fun, yeah, but I’ve had enough now. London, please.”

The TARDIS hums again. Martha thinks that maybe she is laughing.

***

They land on Mars next. Martha rolls her eyes.

“No oxygen,” she points out, crossing her arms. “At least take me somewhere I can breathe.”

They take off before she can say another word.

***

The TARDIS overshoots again. And again. Rather a lot. They go to planets with blue skies and pink skies and green, lands made entirely out of sea, places with insect-people and cheetah-people and proud warrior races, and slowly Martha finds herself enjoying it without trying hard not to, and one day under a glorious orange sky she has to admit it is all so beautiful, and it is still beautiful, even without her Doctor by her side.

And one day, the penny drops.

“The scenic route,” Martha says, accusatory, as she flops down on the jumpseat. “You’re taking me home by the scenic route, aren’t you.”

The TARDIS says nothing, but then Martha did not exactly expect her to.

“Well, I think it’s nice of you, and all, but you don’t have to keep his promises for him.” It’s hard to say these words, almost, but they are true: “I’m used to having them broken.”

The TARDIS still does not respond.

“Right,” says Martha, getting up. “If I’m going travelling, I’m going travelling. But I’d like to choose my own route, thanks very much.”

And then the TARDIS hums, and they are flying.

***

They land in, well. It’s hard to identify at first, all swirls of blue light and purple light and yellow light that should probably be blinding but isn’t. Martha gets the eeriest feeling, like she ought to be choking, or burning, or falling through space, or –

_Oh God_ , she thinks, in a panic. _Am I standing in a supernova?_

A book hovers in front of her face, shockingly unscathed. She reaches a hand out and grabs it.

_Of Medusa’s Cascade and Harmony’s Eye_ , it reads, _A Guide to Piloting and Maintaining Your TARDIS._

“Huh,” says Martha, and steps back inside.

***

Martha nearly crashes into a tree and a waterfall and, on one notable occasion, Venus, but she gets the hang of flying quickly enough, all things considered. She thinks that maybe the TARDIS is making it easy for her on purpose. She’s not complaining.

Their travel is a bit more focused, after that. Martha gets to meet Alexander Fleming, gets a signed polio vaccine from Dr Salk. She spends some time in alien hospitals next, conning her way into an internship and then a pupillage in a hospital in New New Orleans with what she has begun to see as her psychic paper.

And one day she finds the Doctor’s old sonic, sitting innocently on the console. She indulges in a few tears, maybe five minutes’ worth, and then she calms down and cleans up and fiddles with it until she figures out how to unlock a door, wipe a computer, do a medical scan.

And another day she finds herself running, chased by something with tentacles and an unpleasant expression that seems to have mistaken her for an escaped slave of some sort, and she whips out the screwdriver and blasts the locks on a few gates and collapses, panting, laughing, through the TARDIS doors.

She has to take a few deep breaths to calm down, after that, and almost thinks _so_ _help me, Mr Smith,  I’m turning into you_. The thought is almost inevitable, but then again –

_Then again_ , she thinks, _there has to be something I’m forgetting. There has to be some part of this I’m missing_.

***

She has the feeling she’ll find it. She has the feeling she won’t want to.

She is, as she so often is, right.

***

“Okay,” says Martha, breathing deep. “Okay, alright, okay.”

She grips the wires in her palm: a pair of red ones, with crocodile clips, rusted over. Far away there is a spaceship carrying two thousand passengers and a hull breach, leaking oxygen into deep space. Further still, in the opposite direction, there is a ship carrying a hundred with broken-down engines, crippled in enemy territory, about to be blasted to pieces. It has, at the best, three more minutes, and Martha wants to fix those engines but she just doesn’t have the _time_.

But that ship, the crippled ship, is full of oxygen. And she holds the switch to the venting system in the palm of her hand.

“Typical,” Martha says, loudly, to no one in particular. “I say, show me the wonders of the universe, and you take me to a warzone.”

She laughs at that. Someone has to.

She’s wired up to the command console, in the broken-down flagship of this broken-down fleet. By now she’s almost forgotten how she got here, and she figures it isn’t important anyway. What is important is: she left the comms open, and she can hear the two thousand in the hull-breached ship suffocate, slowly, running out of oxygen. What is important is: there is an enemy fighter on the horizon line, Martha can see it, and it is about to obliterate the only source of oxygen close enough to matter at all. What is important is: she has the wires in her hand, and she can save them, and if she’s going to do it she has to do it _now_.

What is not important is that she has left the comms open for both ships, and the ones in the crippled ship are joking and genial and brave, and if she connects the wires she will have killed them, them already dying, with her own hands. The crippled ship is a hospital ship. This should not matter at all.

_First do no harm_ , thinks Martha. _It’s not even in the Oath_.

_Triage,_ thinks Martha, _This is triage,_ and she breathes, and feels she, of all people, deserves it least.

She connects the wires –

 - and –

At last, finally, truly, she _understands_.

***

In the night, in the TARDIS, she cries.

She cries for the hundred on the crippled ship, and she cries for their families, back at home. She cries for her family, who will not miss her, who she misses so hard it hurts. She cries for the girl she was before, innocent and idealistic and soft, and she cries because she is afraid of the woman she has become.

She cries for herself.

She cries for _him_.

“I understand,” she says, through her tears, like she’s choking. “I understand, now. I understand what it means to be you.”

“I can’t be you,” she whispers, later, to herself, to no one. “I can’t do it.”

And later still, with a thought of the two thousand on that _other_ ship and a memory of the wonder of an alien sunset in an alien sky and a bolt of horror that turns her stomach and doesn’t surprise, she realizes that she _can_.

And after, and after all, she holds his watch in her hands and it whispers to her in a voice that was and should never have been her everything, and she wonders if she _should_.

***

She takes the TARDIS home again.

She visits her parents and her sister and her brother, and she makes a point of seeing them as often as she can – on her lunch break, on weekends, on quiet evenings when the pubs are open and Tish is itching for a night out. She’s always been their glue, but now she does what she’s never done and hangs close enough to smother. She does it because she wants to remember what she’s giving up. She does it because she needs to remember what she always has to come back to.

She stays in her flat for long enough that she starts to find it stifling, to finally convince herself that she’s outgrown this place and become a piece that just doesn’t fit back into the puzzle of her life, and in the night when she closes her eyes and feels the pale green walls closing in on her, too far from humming bronze or prison cell or starry sky, she understands that she needs this. Needs to feel too big for something when she’d always, before, felt too small.

She wonders if this is how he does it, how he stays so big and so bright and so always-running. By staying for just a moment too long, until places he belonged became just the wrong fit and the whole universe shrank beside his restlessness enough that he could fool himself into believing that it was small in the face of the light of him.

She decides she doesn’t care. It works for her.

She goes back to school like she’s never left it and she learns to be a doctor like he’d never been and she’d always wanted to be. She learns triage when it means emergency rooms and not planets, learns to improvise with bandages and chloroform and no sonic screwdriver, learns to heal with her hands and her heart and not her words or her anger. And on the day of her graduation, she goes out and buys herself a new wardrobe, with shoes for running and jeans for travelling, and there is brown and there is blue but not a thing is pinstriped or a suit.

She goes home, because there are things that are hers and things that are his and things that she’s borrowed and things that she’ll keep, and home is safe and it is right and it is the place she has always gone to sort out all her messes.

She goes home, because home is one of those things that is hers, and it is something she refuses to lose like he has.

Later, much later, she goes back to the alley where she’d first left herself behind, and she puts her hand on the blue door of the box that had let her. She’d been so different, then, so young and so sure and so insecure, almost-doctor Martha. She’d left that girl as surely as she’d left her flat and left her Doctor and left her box. She’s no longer so young, or so innocent, and she’ll never be almost-anything again.

The key in her hand does not glow, but it does not fill her palm like it used to. She’s grown, in the box and out, and she’s grown out of herself and out of him and into someone new. She’s not a Doctor, but she is a doctor, and as she runs a thumb along the panelling it hums and she knows, she _knows_ , that the box may be borrowed but Doctor Martha Jones is not.

She slips the key inside the lock, and the universe opens before her.

***

“Right,” she says, first thing, coat still on and doors barely shut behind her. “I’m not his replacement, okay? I’ve been a replacement, and I didn’t like it, and I won’t do it again. You take me or leave me, but if you’d rather have someone else, then I’m going. Alright?”

The TARDIS hums, and the console lights up, an invitation, an agreement.

“Alright,” says Doctor Jones, and she begins to grin. She’s wearing trainers. “Alright, then, old girl. Take me anywhere.”


End file.
